


1973 (Here We Go Again).

by Lanna Michaels (lannamichaels)



Category: Moonlight - Fandom
Genre: Podfic Available, Song Lyric Title, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-10-21
Updated: 2007-10-21
Packaged: 2017-10-02 19:27:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lannamichaels/pseuds/Lanna%20Michaels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mick's weakness is blondes. Josef's weakness is Mick.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1973 (Here We Go Again).

**Author's Note:**

> _And though time goes by, I will always be in a club with you in 1973, singing "here we go again". _  
> \- 1973 by James Blunt.
> 
> Canon through 1x03.
> 
> For Luna. :)
> 
>  
> 
> * * *
> 
> Podfic by [](http://tinypinkmouse.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**tinypinkmouse**](http://tinypinkmouse.dreamwidth.org/) is [available here](http://amplificathon.livejournal.com/1047581.html). :D

Mick prefers blondes. Josef has seen young vampires choose victims time and time again that remind them of their makers. He finds this very Freudian. His own children have stayed close, but nightly he watches them devour his doppelgangers, and smiles.

Mick has chosen the opposite and Josef finds this intriguing. _Show me more_, he whispers to the boy, and watches Mick kill a pretty young thing and her never noticing until it was all over. The boy is ruthless. Josef approves. The boy has talent, potential.

_Show me more._

\--

Mick has blood smeared across his face, but it's wrong, somehow. Normally Josef can smell a fresh kill at a hundred yards and with Mick even further, but this is not the way it should be. Mick's hands are shaking and there are bottles strewn all around him.

He looks up at Josef with small, needy eyes, and Josef kisses him to taste the blood, taste the wrongness of it all, and then recoils, because the blood is sour, _poison poison run,_ and all his instincts, honed to perfection after all these years, order him to disappear and never see Mick again. But Josef stays and he listens, and he wonders at this weakness in the boy that he had never noticed before.

And as time passes, he hates himself for not killing Mick that night on the floor, if he had known what would happen, if he had known the death that Mick would bring to them all.

\--

Mick enjoyed the sixties more than anyone Josef knows, and he is more than unwilling to let them go. He comes to the club drunk on hippie blood most days and Josef once watched him wind a scarf slowly around a wisp of a girl, sating his new-found love of nostalgia.

Ah, well. Most vampires are forever stuck in one decade or another. Josef supposes he should be glad Mick's is not so far past. Josef's maker never quite got over the fall of the Roman Empire.

"Dance with me," Mick orders him one night. Josef bites him instead, sinking his fangs into that neck that has tempted him so much, and Mick bucks beneath him, moaning, and they both come before Josef can get him against the wall like he's been wanting to.

The next night, Mick tries for a sly smile, and sits on Josef's lap on the couch in his private room and says, "fuck me?"

\--

It's a girl. It has to be a girl. Some dumb blonde girl. Some warm-blooded pulse-throbbing blonde girl with a sway in her step and a _really_ tight ass. They catch Mick's eye every time. If Josef was threading a fishing pole, or baiting a trap, or rewarding Mick for an exceptionally good blowjob, he'd find the latest Marilyn knock-off and leave her gift wrapped on Mick's bed.

Mick's weakness, but they never last. Mick always comes home to him. This girl can be no different. And so Josef waits. And so he waits. When Mick finally comes to him, it's a year and ten days, and he looks gaunt. Pale. Like he's the starved little mouse that Coraline first turned out of sheer pity.

"I need your help," Mick says, coldly, and his hands are shaking ever so slightly, and he rebuffs Josef's kiss. "I need your help," he repeats, insistently, as Josef simply stares at him. He had not expected this.

"Who is she?" Josef growls. "Because if she has asked you not to feed, I will rip her head off her freckled shoulders and feed it to my dogs."

Mick looks exhausted and when he asks, "Who?", like he isn't protecting his love, but really doesn't know, Josef throws him across the room and, when Mick stumbles to his feet and repeats the question, throws him out the bay window into the sunlight.

"There's no one," Mick swears after he has crawled back in, his skin burnt, his voice raw from the pain of the sunlight. "Josef, there's no one. But I need your help."

He talks. Josef listens. At the end of two hours, Josef has agreed to find Mick a dealer from the Red Cross. And Mick is asleep in Josef's bed, his stomach full of blood from one of Josef's children.

\--

"The deals we make with our consciences," Jillian's pet human slurs, "to be who we are." He is staring into his glass, red wine, a vintage Josef has never heard of and never will again, and Jillian strokes his hair like she would a cat. "To...do what we do."

"Can I kill him, Jillie?" Mick pleads. "I'm begging here."

"Isn't he adorable?" Jillian coos. "I found him at one of Josef's parties. He was so sweet, cowering in the kitchen."

Mick turns his attention to Josef. "Please? Can I kill him?"

Josef smirks. "No. Control your rash impulses."

"Why?" Mick pouts. "You never do."

"I'm older and wiser. Do as I say, not as I do, boy."

"Can I quote you on that?" Mick mimes picking up a pen and paper. "For posterity, I'd like to get that in writing."

Josef swats him and Mick manages to fall into his shoulder, laughing, and lets his fangs down. "All right," Mick says, "but if he starts quoting Aristotle, I'm going to take an inch off his dick."

\--

It's a fad. It will fade. It will be like the time in the seventies when Mick decided to wear leather pants all the time. He'll grow out of it. It's growing pains. Josef surprises even himself at how many ways he finds to excuse Mick's behavior. It's not crossing any lines. It's unorthodox, certainly, but it's not illegal. Mick will wake up one day, drop by Josef's backyard, and kill someone's pet by accident, get into a fight, and come out of it bloodied, defeated, and still grinning. After all, this is the boy who killed his own sire in a fit of pique.

It's ten years now. Josef's oldest son has gotten himself banished from the western seaboard by daring to tell him to kill Mick before his diet drives him insane and he gets them all killed. He may have been right, Josef thinks, sitting by his pool watching Mick swim back and forth, the moonlight caressing his body. Mick is gaunt and never around.

"Cut him off," Jillian had recommended before she had driven back to San Francisco. "No one else would have ever let this go on this long. You're looking weak." Fake concern, Josef had told himself.

Mick pushes himself up out of the pool and the light catches on his biceps, still thick despite his lifestyle, and he stalks over to Josef. "I can hear you thinking even down there," he says.

"Oh?" Josef looks up, and up, at him. One of the more wonderful things about the younger generation. They're skewing taller, broader. More lovely flesh to devour. "What am I thinking?"

"That I should quit my day job and come spend my unlife as your poolboy."

"You're not entirely wrong," Josef says charitably. "What's your asking price?"

"The usual. Pound of flesh, pint of blood..."

Mick hasn't half finished before Josef is waving a girl over. "How's O positive?"

\--

Mick, heaven help him, is not the smartest apple in the barrel. He is breathless, shaking, rambling that he's been found out, that, no, of course, he didn't think to change his name, or move, that why should anyone notice he wasn't aging, and, help, Josef, please help, I've been found out, we've _all_ been found out, and it's all my fault, and oh, god, are they all going to band together and kill me now?

Josef screams at him until his voice is raw, then pins his wrists to the wall and fucks him. So _stupid_. So unbelievably _stupid_.

If he didn't love him so much, he'd kill him where he stood.

\--

It takes twelve years to get used to this decayed blood that Mick likes so much. It takes three more for him to be able to choke it down.

Slowly, Mick looks stronger.

Slowly, Mick looks better.

Slowly, Mick starts to die.

\--

There's only so long a vampire can starve. Josef was caught once, in a time and place best forgotten, and he'd found his own limits when he ripped the chains out of the wall in one last, desperate effort to kill his captors, to feed, to _live_.

Mick should know better.

Of course, Mick should know better about many things. Sometimes, it's hard to believe Mick survived a war.

And it's hard to believe it's been only ten hours since Josef got the phone call. The reporter told. Mick, who himself will never shut up about his trust issues, told the girl and now she's told everyone.

It's the 21st century, but Josef has only so much faith in this culture's pointed disbelief in the supernatural. There's a point where self-delusion breaks. There's a point where it all comes crashing down. And they're teetering now. Josef can feel it.

He has Mick in his basement now, tied, bound, and gagged. Josef twirls the stake between his fingers. He's given it to Mick three times now and each time he has watched Mick nearly die and has not had the strength to end it all for good.

Mick is watching him warily. His entire body is begging. Pleading.

Josef slams the stake into Mick's heart one last time, and tries to smile as Mick's body seizes up. He tries to smile. He tries to find joy in this. He should be satisfied. Mick has become a threat and he needs to be neutralized. And Josef is a cold, unfeeling bastard, or so his victims unfailingly tell him. This should be easy. This should be simple.

This shouldn't _hurt_.

\--

Mick collapses onto the couch next to Josef. The music is pounding hard and Mick is sweaty and exhausted.

He holds his wrist out to Josef and Josef bites and they sit there like that for a long time, living in the moment.

And although there are many more after, and have been many more before, that is the one Josef will always, inexplicably, remember. The one perfect moment, when Mick's pulse matches his, and both begin to slow, and time cannot touch them.

\--

Josef yanks the stake out Mick's heart. He unties the knots, unlocks the chains, and pulls Mick to his feet by one mangled arm.

"Run," he orders him, pushing him towards the door. "If you're not gone by morning, so help me, I'll leave you to the Cleaner."

Mick nods. He gives Josef one last withering glance, then takes off.

Josef turns on his heel and walks up the stairs.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [1973 (Here We Go Again) [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/313780) by [tinypinkmouse_podfic (tinypinkmouse)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tinypinkmouse/pseuds/tinypinkmouse_podfic)




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